The World Might Be Watching You, But No One Really Cares

On My Mind

July 15, 2007|By JOE QUEENAN

In the audaciously predictable style for which he is famous, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently rhapsodized about the many ways in which "transparency" is making our "global discussion ... so much richer."

The theory was that the 24/7 surveillance wrought by camera phones, blogs, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace have turned all of us into public figures. Because everything we say or do is now apt to turn up on the Internet - potentially with humiliating results - we must live our lives more judiciously, cognizant that in the new "transparent" age, there is nowhere to hide.

Not long ago, such a society would have been deemed an Orwellian nightmare, a living hell where the brain police spied on everyone. But somehow Friedman has gotten it into his head that although surveillance is a bad idea when the government does it, it is just peachy keen when done by amateurs.

I'm not so sure. It seems to me that if YouTube had been around when George Washington failed to prevent his Indian allies from butchering unarmed French prisoners (and thereby started the French and Indian War), his career could have been ruined at the start, paving the way for some circumspect scoundrel like Aaron Burr or Benedict Arnold to sabotage the republic before it even got off the ground.

If camera phones had been widely available in the 1930s, shots of FDR's wheelchair would have been posted all over the Internet, and Roosevelt might very well have lost the 1936 election to one of the gutless clowns the Republicans regularly ran against him.

Friedman's argument that "the whole world is watching" - thereby compelling mankind to be on its best behavior - ignores reality. The Taliban is simply not concerned that some blogger, hammering away at his laptop in his mommy's basement, doesn't approve of its activities. Hamas is not worried about having its latest depredations captured on cell-phone cameras.

Hugo Chavez doesn't care how many videos poking fun at him are posted on YouTube - he's still going to silence the media, suppress the opposition and wreck Venezuela's economy. By the looks of it, Chavez feels the same way about blogs: Sticks and stones may break his bones, but words will never hurt him.

Friedman suggests that the "digital footprint" young people leave on MySpace and Facebook means - and he doesn't seem to think this is necessarily bad - that it will be extremely difficult for them to recover from the mistakes of their youth. Deceitful resumes, compromising photos, ill-advised confessions of sexual predilections could all come back to haunt them. But this assumes that some future version of American society actually will hold people accountable for their bozolike past behavior.

Get real. When the 35-year-old twit who once posted a video of himself mooning Dick Cheney applies for a job with the International Monetary Fund, the 36-year-old interviewing him for the position will be the guy who once blogged about imprisoning George Bush on the planet Alderaan and getting the Death Star to destroy the State Department. That's not a digital footprint. It's a digital handshake.

The one seemingly valid point that Friedman makes is that transparency will force corporations to be on their best behavior. But even this is a flawed assumption. Camera phones and YouTube videos are useful when depicting pollution or botched surgical procedures. But transparency doesn't work well in the bond market or the private equity field because finance is an abstraction and cell-phone cameras cannot capture the invisible. You cannot post a picture of a hyped stock. You cannot post a video of a rigged initial public offering. You cannot depict felonious stock market activity on MySpace unless some white-collar crook agrees to be videotaped.

If "the new transparency" actually could deter obnoxious or criminal behavior, it might be worth getting the whole world watching. But YouTube postings are not going to prevent real estate developers from building hideous McMansions, and no amount of blogging is going to keep lunatics in Hummers from plowing into Chevrolet Cavaliers. Muggers, drug dealers, car thieves, ax murderers, hedge fund managers and Antonin Scalia are not afraid of the blogosphere. Especially Scalia.

The weapons of transparency might be good at embarrassing people, but this approach only works with people who worry about being embarrassed. The Mafia doesn't. Osama bin Laden doesn't. The guy who's going to key your car tonight just because you stole his parking space doesn't. And the woman who conceivably might confront you with your quasi-pornographic, falsehood-swollen online profile 10 years from now isn't going to because she's the gal who once posted a video of herself puking her guts all over her wedding cake.

In a society in which everyone has decided to immortalize their stupidity, being an idiot isn't going to hurt anyone's career. The new "transparency" is just like the old television: The whole world might be watching, but nobody seems to be paying much attention.

Queenan writes frequently for Barron's, The New York Times Book Review and the Guardian. He wrote this originally for the Los Angeles Times.